Should You Just Give Up? The New Yorker Says Yes

I was scrolling Instagram when I saw the New Yorker post a graphic saying “SHOULD YOU JUST GIVE UP?” Before I could read the article, before I could screenshot it to remember to go back to it (the highest compliment) I said an emphatic YES to myself. And by the looks of it, I wasn’t alone - the post already had over 4k likes in the 40 minutes it had been posted.

I’ve been feeling like life is a slog, something to be endured, something to get through. Put one foot in front of the other until the weekend, so you can rest and prepare to do it all over again. The magic of life is for other people - my goal is to survive. If I can do that while avoiding anxiety, that’s a win. While other people on the plane get to look wistfully at the clouds, my job is to keep it in the air by the sheer force of my worry.

Says author Joshua Rothman in the story while quoting Oliver Burkeman, “many people refuse to give up. They are perfectionists who strive ceaselessly to get control of their lives as workers, parents, citizens, and friends. Experiencing life as ‘an endless series of things we must master, learn, or conquer’ has the effect of turning it into ‘a dull, solitary, often infuriating chore, something to be endured in order to make it to a supposedly better time, which never quite seems to arrive.’”

How I feel that! The better time is for other people, other times, other lives.

Instead, what if we…give up? What if we “acknowledge our limits [and] accomplish more of what matters while enjoying life now?” Giving up isn’t a defeat. In fact, according to psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, “not being able to give up is to not be able to allow for loss, for vulnerability; not to be able to allow for the passing of time and the revisions it brings.”

So give up. Give up the rules of your own making that are keeping you from actually living. Give up your worries about being “enough” for everybody (spoiler: you can’t be) and focus on being enough for yourself. Give up the hobby you used to enjoy but no longer do. Give up the definitions that have defined you but no longer serve you. Realize that we can “mourn things without mourning ourselves. They’re what’s ending, not us.”

Wow.

Interested in more? Check out Oliver Burkeman’s new book Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.